Seed Flats, Flameweeding and Much More with Lucky Dog Organic Farm

We're pleased to share another report on the progress of Catskills CRAFT, a networking group for beginning farmers in our region. Sonia Janiszewski, the group's coordinator, has provided us with another summary of this month's visit to Lucky Dog Organic Farm in Hamden, NY. Cross posted from catskillscraft.org


Lucky Dog Organic Farm welcomed a dozen beginning farmers from the Catskills Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) on Monday, August 8th for a farm tour and discussion of how the farm has adapted to expansion. Kalan Joslin, the field manager, and Richard Giles, owner, led the group on a tour through the farm’s multiple greenhouses and produce fields in Hamden, NY. The group ended the evening with a potluck social.

In fewer than ten years, Lucky Dog Organic Farm has grown to encompass a farm store, wholesale operation, community supported agriculture (CSA) program, farmers market sales and two on-farm restaurants. Approximately fifty percent of their revenue comes from their CSA and farmers markets (Pakatakan farmers market near Margaretville, the Callicoon farmers market, the Cooperstown farmers market and the Socrates Sculpture Park Greenmarket in New York City). The balance is sold through regional distributors. This accelerated pace of expansion seems second nature to Richard and Holley White-Giles who have planted their family along with their crops in this small river-bottom town.


The farm is comprised of 45 owned acres and has expanded onto an additional 115 leased acres where they grow organic produce and cover crop used to enrich farm-made compost. With the increase in land came the need for efficiencies in techniques, equipment and staff.

With Kalan demonstrating, the participants were shown the unique block seeder that Lucky Dog traded in for its traditional cell seeding technique in an effort to reduce plastic waste. They begin with a soil mix and water that when fed through the block seeder, produces “flats” of seeded soil that are placed in reused plastic bread trays. This system both eliminates waste and cuts a labor-intensive farm task down to a two-person operation.


As do all organic farms, Lucky Dog battles with weeds each season. Last season, Lucky Dog was awarded a grant through the Watershed Agricultural Council that enabled them to purchase a tractor-mounted vegetable bed flameweeder. This piece of machinery burns propane fuel through torches aimed at the surface of the crop beds in order to destroy small emerging weeds either just before planting or just before the crop emerges. With this flameweeder, they are able to sweep quickly across these areas without disturbing the soil, to kill new flushes of weeds, decreasing the staff time dedicated to weeding and the fossil fuels that would be required of several high-horse power tillage trips doing the same job.

While new introductions in techniques and equipment have enabled Lucky Dog to expand through efficiencies, staffing and teaming has been a key factor in the farm’s ability to adapt. Lucky Dog employs six year round and 16 additional seasonal staff at the farm. In 2002, Kalan, the CRAFT visit’s tour leader, began working at Lucky Dog and this job became a passion. Now a truly indispensable employee, Kalan helps to manage the farm with Richard and works closely with the other crew members, training and sharing expertise.

For more information about Lucky Dog Organic Farm , visit www.luckydogorganic.com, or stop by their farm store the next time you pass through Hamden.

Catskills CRAFT visits are scheduled at a different farm each month through November. Visit www.catskillscraft.org for a full schedule.

Views from the Field: Richard Giles

In the most recent Views from the Field, we hear from Delaware County vegetable farmer Richard Giles. Richard received a Pure Catskills Agricultural Development last year to purchase a new tractor implement for Lucky Dog Organic Farm. Also check out the video below for the Lucky Dog crew in action.

Lucky Dog Farm, Hamden NY from VeccVideography on Vimeo.

One of the most important crops on our farm has been a washed mix of baby salad greens, which we grow on wide, flat-topped bedded rows. And because we are an organic farm, weeds have always been our greatest challenge in growing this high-valued crop. So we applied for the Pure Catskills grant to help us purchase a tractor-mounted vegetable bed flameweeder.

This piece of machinery burns propane fuel through torches aimed at the surface of our crop beds in order to destroy small emerging weeds either just before planting or just before the crop emerges. I had used similar machinery for weed control in cotton in the south, but flame weeding hasn’t been a common practice in this part of the country. One of the obstacles we encountered as we began researching the equipment was that our local propane dealers were not familiar with it, and were at first reluctant to commit to supplying fuel for the machine.

The other obstacle was money. This is a familiar problem. I think that lack of access to money for production-improving practices is certainly one of the top problems for the small diverse farms in the Catskills. In the course of our search, we found machines built by two companies that seemed to fit our needs, one of them priced at about $8,500 and the other at about $12,500. As luck would have it, the machine best suited tour crops was also build by Flame Engineering, the company with the most experience in building flame weeding equipment. And it was the lower priced machine. Even so, we would not have been able to buy the machine without the Pure Catskills grant.

We received the machine in mid-June, a little late for a full-season test, but early enough to get a lot of use out of the new weeder. I had imagined the machine mostly as a salad production enhancing tool, but as soon as we had it set up and filled with fuel, we flamed over the tops of some just –emerging potatoes in rows that were becoming fuzzy with weed seedlings. Over the course of the summer, we used it on carrots, a crop that is very slow to germinate and very poor at competing with weeds, on unplanted beds ahead of our lettuce transplanted, on potatoes again at the end of the season, after the vines had been clipped in the weedy zone before harvest and of course on our salad beds.

Because we farm in a flood plain, we will never be free of weed seed, but we are already beginning to reduce our weed load with this piece of equipment. In the spring and early summer we usually prepare quite a bit of our vegetable cropland for planting. As we work through the season planting and transplanting, some of these fields have to be reworked, by means of mechanical tillage, several times to keep weeks down. With this flamer weeder, we are able to sweep quickly across these areas without disturbing the soil, to kill new flushes of weeds. The efficiency of this method makes me happy. One of my concerns when we were contemplating this machine was that even though we would not be using synthetic herbicides, we would be burning fossil fuel to kill our weeds. We are in fact doing just this. But we have made a positive compromise, trading a swift, low horsepower trip over the field to burn weeds with propane for several high horse power tillage trips.